MOUNT VERNON — Area farmers are featured in a film, “Voices of Iowa Farm Women,” that will be screened in Iowa City and Mount Vernon and followed by panel discussions with the filmmaker and women farmers.
The Iowa City screening is Wednesday, March 9, at 7 p.m. in 106 Gilmore Hall on the University of Iowa campus. The Mount Vernon screening is Thursday, March 10, at 7 p.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons on the Cornell College campus. Admission is free to both screenings.
The 20-minute video examines Iowa’s heritage and legacy told through interviews with contemporary farm women who practice small-farm, value-added and direct-marketing agriculture.
The film focuses on seven Iowans, including area farmers Laura Krouse of Mount Vernon, an instructor in the Cornell biology department who also grows vegetables for about 130 area families, maintains an heirloom variety of field corn and raises corn, soybeans and oats organically; Janette Ryan-Busch of Iowa City, who for over 20 years has run Fae Ridge Farm, a small organic herb and produce farm where she also raises angora goats and supplies hand spinners in the Midwest; and Susan Jutz of Solon, who grows vegetables for about 150 area families, plus dairy goats, hogs and lambs for direct marketing locally.
Following each screening will be a discussion with women farmers in the film, filmmaker Cynthia Vagnetti of Madison, Wis., and Atlantic farmer Denise O’Brien, executive director of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network and a member of the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame. The Mount Vernon panel will be moderated by Margaret Kim Peterson, a Mount Vernon native who is an associate professor of theology at Eastern University in Pennsylvania.
Sponsors of the screenings and panel discussions are the Women, Food and Agriculture Network, the Iowa Women’s Foundation, the University of Iowa Women’s Resource and Action Center, and Cornell’s Lecture, Artists and Cultural Events (LACE) consortium, with additional support from the Iowa Women’s Archives.
